Approximately 85 million units of red blood cells are transfused each year worldwide; over 15 million pints of blood are transfused annually in the U.S. and Canada. Blood transfusions are common, with approximately 1 in 7 hospitalized patients requiring at least one transfusion.
In the United States, blood transfusion may be the most common procedure performed for patients 45 years of age and older (in 2011), and among the top five most common procedures for patients between the ages of 1 and 44 years. Although most transfusions are conducted without major complications, transfusion related adverse events cost approximately $17 Billion/year in the U.S. which account for more of the cost of each transfusion than acquisition and procedure costs combined. See e.g., Shander, A; Hofmann, A; Gombotz, H; Theusinger, O M; Spahn, D R (2007). “Estimating the cost of blood: Past, present, and future directions”. Best practice & research. Clinical anaesthesiology 21 (2): 271-89.
In order to transfuse blood safely to a patient, one normally must make sure the donor blood is compatible with the recipient. Otherwise transfusion reactions may occur which often result from antibodies in the recipient attacking antigens on the donor blood cells, which can result in the red blood cell hemolysis leading to fever, hypotension, acute respiratory failure, and acute renal failure. However, under certain circumstances, blood type information of the donor and/or the recipient may not be known before a blood source must be supplied to a recipient, or sufficiently amount of a blood supply with a matching blood type is not available. In such circumstances, the patient must go without blood, or the clinician must weigh the cost/benefit of purposely supplying or transfusing a blood supply with a mis-matched blood type, or potentially a mis-matched blood type, to a recipient.
Therefore, what are needed are methods and/or compositions that enable supplying or transfusing a blood supply with a mis-matched blood type, or potentially a mis-matched blood type, to a recipient while reducing, minimizing or removing the adverse effects caused by or associated with such blood supplying or transfusing to a recipient. The present invention addresses these and other related needs in the art.